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Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps
A foundational peer-to-peer platform for building decentralized applications, offering a unique solution for global state consistency and enabling browser-based apps to interact locally with the network, contrasting with centralized cloud APIs.
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A foundational peer-to-peer platform for building decentralized applications, offering a unique solution for global state consistency and enabling browser-based apps to interact locally with the network, contrasting with centralized cloud APIs.
Freenet (Hyphanet) addresses the fundamental challenges of decentralization, particularly global state consistency, a critical barrier for robust peer-to-peer applications. Its innovative use of WebAssembly contracts and a commutative merge operation for state updates offers a scalable and resilient architecture. This platform enables developers to build censorship-resistant, privacy-preserving applications without reliance on centralized cloud infrastructure. Market implications include fostering a new generation of decentralized SaaS alternatives, particularly for communication (River) and content management (Delta), appealing to users and organizations prioritizing data sovereignty and resilience against single points of failure. The ability for browser-based apps to interact locally with the Freenet peer simplifies development and deployment, potentially accelerating adoption in niche markets seeking true decentralization.
For the past 5 years or so I've been working on a ground-up redesign of Freenet, my peer-to-peer project from the early 2000s (now renamed Hyphanet).The new Freenet has been up and running since December along with some early applications like River[1], our decentralized group chat and Delta - a decentralized CMS. Users have already started to build their own apps on Freenet including games, and we have some interesting apps in development like Atlas, a search/recommendation engine.Architecturally, this new Freenet is a global, decentralized key-value store where keys are webassembly contracts which define what values (aka "state") are valid for that key, how or when the values can be mutated, and how the state can be efficiently synchronized between peers.We've developed a unique (AFAIK) solution to the consistency problem, every contract must define a "merge" operation for the contract's associated state. This operation must be commutative, meaning that you can merge multiple states in any order and you'll get the same end result.This approach allows state updates to spread through the network like a virus[2], which typically achieves consistent global state in a few seconds or less.Like the world wide web, Freenet applications can be downloaded from the network itself and run in a web browser - similar to single-page apps on the normal web. However, rather than connecting back to an API running in a datacenter, the webapp connects locally to the Freenet peer and interacts with Freenet contracts and delegates over a local websocket connection.If you'd like to try Freenet we have convenient installers for the major desktop OSs but not yet mobile, and you can be chatting with other users on River within seconds[3]. Happy to answer any questions, you're also welcome to read our FAQ[4], or watch a talk I gave back in March[5].[1] https://github.com/freenet/river[2] https://freenet.org/about/news/summary-delta-sync/[3] https://freenet.org/quickstart/[4] https://freenet.org/faq/[5] https://youtu.be/3SxNBz1VTE0
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What is Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps?
Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps is analyzed by our AI as: A foundational peer-to-peer platform for building decentralized applications, offering a unique solution for global state consistency and enabling browser-based apps to interact locally with the network, contrasting with centralized cloud APIs.. It focuses on Freenet (Hyphanet) addresses the fundamental challenges of decentralization, particularly global state consistency, a critical barrier for robust p...
Where did Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps originate?
Data for Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps was aggregated directly from the Hacker News community ecosystem, representing raw developer and early-adopter sentiment.
When was Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps publicly launched?
The initial public indexing or launch date for Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps within our tracked developer communities was recorded on May 22, 2026.
How popular is Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps?
Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps has achieved measurable traction, logging over 221 traction score and facilitating 120 recorded discussions or engagements.
Which technical categories define Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps?
Based on metadata extraction, Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps is categorized under topics such as: peer-to-peer platform, decentralized apps, Hyphanet, global, decentralized key-value store.
What are some commercial alternatives to Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps?
Our semantic intelligence engine identifies potential commercial alternatives in the SaaS space, such as Monkey Morse, which offers overlapping value propositions.
How does the creator describe Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps?
The original author or development team describes the product as follows: "For the past 5 years or so I've been working on a ground-up redesign of Freenet, my peer-to-peer project from the early 2000s (now renamed Hyphanet).The new Freenet has been up and running since De..."
Community Voice & Feedback
Exciting to see Freenet innovating so much, Ian! I haven't really dug in too deep but love that it's in Rust. What's it look like over the wire? How conspicuous is it in the face of, say government censors who can see and control every packet?Been chatting a lot with the HolePunch/Tether folks, and their work is impressive, particularly the use of the DHT for all signaling, Tailscale-inspired (aka Birthday Paradox) NAT hole-punching, an entire JavaScript runtime, etc. I'm curious about some of those details in Freenet. In particular, does it do fully decentralized hole punching?Either way, congrats!
It feels like the state merging approach just pushes the hard problems onto the user, without giving them the tools to solve those problems properly.Imagine an application where an authorized group of users can create and vote in polls, using cryptographic signatures and public/private keys for user verification.What prevents me from connecting and saying that "everybody's state is wrong, that poll in 2024 which didn't reach quorum actually did, because I voted in it, here's my vote." How can the state merger know that the existing state has been valid for two years, and that the vote shouldn't be retroactively applied?Blockchains solve this by having state get more authoritative as blocks age. To undo the `poll_didnt_reach_quorum` state transition from 2024, one would have to rewind all blocks that have been created since, and PoW / PoS ensures that this is incredibly costly to do.On a related note, how does your design prevent sybil attacks, where one participant floods the network with many large contracts and large state updates?
It's refreshing to see people doing something conceptually interesting outside of the LLM domain.
Looks very interesting! I stumbled across your webpage a few months ago while looking into the state of peer-to-peer. Glad to see p2p projects are still active.
For values that don't have a natural merge function (or where you don't want to bother writing one), would it make sense to sync update logs instead? That is:- The synced value is a history of client updates, sorted in some eventually consistent order (e.g. by hybrid logical clocks). Merging takes the union of the update sets.- The user-visible value is the result of processing these updates in order, using arbitrary contract code.This is overkill for simple last-writer-wins values, but it lets you support fairly general data types & arbitrary update functions, including ones that preserve application-specific invariants.The Automerge CRDT library works like this already [1][2], but it only allows specific updates to JSON data. Sharing code via your contracts solves the hard part of generalizing that to arbitrary data & updates.[1] https://automerge.org/[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04263
Notably this project was conceived by a backroom decision to dump the original Freenet development team's work,in favor of a rewrite from different developers, without asking anyone on the original team.It was an ivory tower decision which was announced on the mailing list without prior discussion.The old team did not agree, yet it was forced through by a decision of the "board".The "board" was a group of people which had not been active on the project for over a decade.https://www.mail-archive.com/devl@freenetproject.org/msg5526...The funding of the existing, original "Freenet" was repurposed for the new one of course.The new "Freenet" does not have anonymity as a design goal anymore,while the old one continues to exist and is maintained under its new name "Hyphanet" at:https://www.hyphanet.org/
Very interesting. Beyond ideological motivation, I’m curious what the long-term incentive is for someone to run a peer.For example, if Freenet were to reach scale, it could eventually need some kind of economic primitive around it. Something similar to how Filecoin handles decentralized storage, but for app state. One way to do this could be paying peers to keep app state available, serve it reliably, etc. and prove they are doing so.
I think better approach for "ghost keys" would be requiring X amount of crypto to be sent to 0x0 (burning). Current implementation (requiring donation to freenet) basically gives freenet foundation infinite reputation (including any other potential project that would accept ghost keys as identity), kinda breaking the decentralization aspect
Neat. I've been wanting to see WASM-defined network behavior like this for a while (yay arbitrary consistency algorithms!), I'll have to explore it in more detail :)(the main thing I've been wanting to try: rather than graphql, send a WASM blob along with your request to a server, and just run it to filter fields in the response / pipeline requests / define "fail if any err / pair errors with requests" for concurrent requests. arguably you could even have it control callee-internal retries.)
Very cool project!> We've developed a unique (AFAIK) solution to the consistency problem, every contract must define a "merge" operation for the contract's associated state. This operation must be commutative, meaning that you can merge multiple states in any order and you'll get the same end result.Where can I learn more about this? How is this different from CRDTs/CmRDTs?
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